Only if you can properly feed, house, clothe, entertain, educate and nurture them. Cultivating a large number of high tier STEM experts is no easy task.
If it were only as simple as population size then 1970s China would have suddenly become a superpower overnight. India wouldn't be arguably the world's worst nation to live in with almost no high tech industry outside of software (of which it is just a minor and backwards player on the global totem pole).
Even with half its current population, China with 600M people would be roughly equal to the EU + USA in population size. A nation as small as Sweden has much more tech, scientific, industrial and manufacturing capability + output than India. It absolutely is not simply size of population. Beyond a critical limit, a larger population begins to bring in more negatives on balance than positives. Not every person is going to become a top tier STEM talent and nor should a society be composed of only STEM people.
You can bet that a smaller population China (500M to 700M) is going to perform much better than a 1B+ China. With a smaller population you have same resources for fewer people = more resources per capita and better everything. The engine of progress (STEM) is always a small proportion of your total population and yes even for East Asian nations it's like 30% of the workforce at most and that's defining STEM loosely.
If you're talking nominal size of STEM pool, well you've missed the point that it's the top tier of performers that really push the boundaries. Everyone else is a minor player or a supporting role. Hence you do not need a massive nominal size of STEM people. Proof of this is pretty much every tech capable European and Asian nation (think Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, even UK) is per capita a "better player" than China. This means adjusted for size of population. China can "slim the herd" with zero effect on its current STEM performance. Because 80%+ (number from my ass to make the point) are not pushing anything forward.
The STEM talent of importance is NOT calculated from a % of total population (again look at good and bad examples above) but a natural limit set from the number of STEM experts you have cultivated over the decades to pass their knowledge down and train the next generations, the number and capability of institutions you have, funding, access to capital, access to markets, society that embraces idea sharing (westerners often will call this IP infringement lol we have extreme examples here) and idea taking/stealing whatever... someone taught us maths right, no one has ownership over logic or physics. Factors like these determine STEM engine not % of population. Think India vs Switzerland.
As long as this reduction in population is over many decades or centuries, it is something that should be done by China to elevate its living standards per capita. One may make an argument about consumer market size. Well if it is such a magical thing how come India's consumer market hasn't made it a superpower or even a middle income nation after 70 years of independence from Britain? We should still remember that a China with only 600M people is still going to be one of the top 2 populous nations on earth with the US coming in third at maybe by then 400M people.
Two points - 600M is a massive market, world's second largest market by population and certainly still the largest by far measured by consumption volume and value. It's GDP per capita would be well over 10x India's by today's measure and this is with India overmeasuring themselves as is now abundantly clear. Point 2 is China's development and growth was not derived from market size. It's a low consumption market overall. This will change as it gets wealthier and social protection improves with a smaller population to look after.
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